what does “remastered” as in remastered song mean?
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They take the masters, the original recording, and re-mix it. That means they adjust the levels of the individual channels of the track, which will do things like emphasize the instruments differently and whatnot
**Mastering is the final step of the music production process that “fine tunes” the sound of the song for the medium through which it will be played.**
Here is an example. Back in the day, the song was recorded in a studio, ‘mixed’ by an engineer, then recorded to a master tape.. well, most people were going to buy the music on the medium of vinyl records. Vinyl records have some limitations to their sound, so the final master mix needs to be “Mastered” to compensate for some of the shortcomings of the vinyl format. There are such things as the overall loudness of the track needing to be within certain limits or it could make the needle jump out of the grooves. There were also changes that would equalize certain frequencies of the music to compensate for issues with the vinyl format. The engineer’s goal was to make the music sound as loud and clear and faithfully reproduced.
Now, music is mostly played digitally ( when CD’s came out, there was a whole new process to master for CD’s ) and most of it is “compressed*” through formats like MP3’s.. for music to sound as good as it possibly can on a specific format, like Spotify, there is a process that the music goes through to make sure it sounds as good as possible through that streaming format.
Now that you know what Mastering is… **ReMastering** is when a song ( like an old Beatles song from the 60’s ) is put through a process of “fixing” it so it sounds “better” on a new format. They did this frequently in the era of CD’s ( usually it was mostly a way to sell the music again )
Now, there are amazing tools, both digital software and analogue equipment that Mastering engineers use to make music sound brighter, w i d e r, more detailed, deeper, thicker, punchier, sparklier, more-present and many many more adjectives. But mostly perceptibly ***LOUDER***. So, many ReMasters are engineers taking a song or album that had been previously mastered either with old, outdated techniques, or had been mastered for an obsolete format, or was mastered to a quieter specification AND PUMPING THAT SONG UP!
If you want to know more about mastering [check out this video.](https://youtu.be/Szv32PCJfs0?si=BUq-VrQSsOnPTfI3). or just google it. It is a VERY DEEP and Mysterious dark art… and you can go deep down a rabbit hole. Also there is some pretty amazing software that helps with mastering as well, check out [Izotope’s Ozone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdr1yxgPX1Y).
*compression is the process of taking a digital file and making it smaller, ideally without losing quality ( not to be confused with Audio Compression… and that’s a whole ‘nother post 😉
“Remastered” in terms of a song means taking the original recording and enhancing the sound quality using modern technology. It’s like taking an old, faded photo and using photo editing software to make the colors clearer and sharper. For a song, this could mean reducing background noise, adjusting the balance of vocal and instrument volumes, or making it sound better on today’s speakers and headphones.
Whether they are just doing the actual “mastering” over again on the final print or going deeper into the mix (working on each instrumental track separately, like the voice or guitars separately), what remastered almost always means is “we have changed the sonic qualities of the track to sound more commercial today”.
Like, literally, if you want to understand what it is, it’s a commercial decision to re-release the song with a more current sounding studio work done on top. It’s not to make it “better” or “cleaner” or whatever. It is always to make it match the current industry’s “sound”. This is why they will keep remastering the same old songs to match the new-new eras.
A few great comments here already, but worth adding: industry standard levels were much lower in the past due to various limits in technology and playback (let’s say, -12dB versus modern mixes crushing everything near 0dB – these are measures that quantify a signal level – 0dB is the limit of a given speaker’s amplifier) , so albums or movies are “remastered” to make them more normalized with modern-day listening environments and modern day industry standards. It’s why a new song today sounds louder than an original Beatles song played after it. In a small way, it’s like media becoming higher resolution with larger average file sizes, so modern phones and computers then need more storage space to adequately house them.
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